Posted
by
timothyon Saturday March 24, 2012 @06:48PM
from the combine-two-fetishes-into-one dept.

New submitter smi.james.th writes with an AP story, and extracts from it: "'Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they are cutting classes, the city's education secretary, Coriolano Moraes, said Thursday.' Personally I don't find this too inspiring. Mr. Orwell certainly has warned the world about this."

Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.

Conservatives are the ones for freedom and elimination of government oversight at all levels.

Liberals are the ones who do things "for your own good".

Get it straight man or you end up voting for exactly the opposite result as you desire. See: present.

Actually conservatism is all about worship of the status quo. It is the belief that it should change very slowly if at all. It's misused all the time by people who don't understand it, and so has become one of those words that means whatever the speaker intends it to mean. But that's the actual definition; look it up if you doubt me.

Libertarians (similar to classical liberals, nothing like modern liberals) are the ones who want to maximize freedom. Libertarianism is the belief that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want, no matter who disapproves, so long as they don't pose a threat to non-participants. Libertarianism would seriously take off as a political movement if it were possible to get candidates on the ballot for all major elections, which is why the two-party duopoly creates ridiculously elaborate, inconsistent, burdensome electoral rules and deeply entrenched funding mechanisms to prevent this from happening.

Of course, "convervative" has been co-opted as a term and now tends to mean someone who is prudish, religious in an institutional (not personal) way, and wishes their preferred lifestyle to have the force of law, combined with the celebration of corporate power over state power. Just like "liberal" has become co-opted to mean "we know what's good for you" social engineering as well as an obsession with group identity (black, white, female, etc) at the expense of dealing with people as individuals. In that sense conservatives tend to be materialistic while liberals tend to be utterly childish and unable to separate their emotions from reason. Both are the delight of power-hungry politicians everywhere because both can be pandered to.

Here we go, again another round of 1980 hysteria in the "government is going to track our every move" category.
First of all, if they wanted to track you; then they'd sure as hell do it no matter what. They don't need high tech gadgets to do that either.
But on to RFID. Our student ID cards at college/university here work by RFID. We use them to open doors, as copy cards, to pay for food in the cafeteria... . So you end up with a bunch of (electronic/electrical) engineering students with RFID cards that you actually get to store money on indirectly (its kept on the server how much money is on the card). So there are enough reasons to duplicate somebody else's card. Contrary to what you might be thinking, not a single person has even managed to do that successfully. The encoding is fairly tricky and just replicating it is extremely hard.
What we did try was to track each other using the RFID tags in these cards (as that's considerably easier than trying to reverse engineer them). The thing is, a tracking range of a whole 15cm isn't all that useful last time I checked. So claiming you can track people through these tags is foolish. Unless if they're passing through lets say a door frame.
So I seriously doubt that any high school kid will be able to figure it out that easily, all this does is save the school some time in the morning by being able to skip the daily roll call.